DESERT PEAKS SECTION - NEWSLETTER NO. 53
ANGELES CHAPTER - SIERRA CLUB


  March 13, 1958

Dear Desert Peaker,

Your Chairman, a victim of the six-day week ever since Thanksgiving, has not done much hiking lately, so that this newsletter is of necessity composed of secondhand accounts of trips the Chairman wished he could have been on.

Don Clarke, reporting on the Mopah Pk. trip, December 14-15, says that: "Three cars found the right desert road on Friday night, despite 2 miles inaccuracy in the schedule (12.6 miles from Vidal Jct., not 10). Chuck Ballard and family had to retreat temporarily next morning for muffler repairs. Six other foot-loose souls took about a 14-mile desert walk on Saturday, in a loop thru the Turtle Mountains, climbing a 3,500 ft. summit en route. Twenty-two gathered for a pleasant campfire Saturday night. The rain held off until after reveille next morning, but arrived with enough authority to cancel the Sunday Mopah Pk. climb."

Mopah Peak is an excellent climb and would doubtless be voted onto the qualifying list if a scheduled DPS trip reached its summit. We will try to reschedule the trip. Don did not feel that the section of the Turtle Mountains that they explored Saturday contained any peaks of qualifying list caliber.

There have been numberless outlaw trips lately. New peaks climbed include Piper Peak in Nevada (across Fish Lake Valley from the White Mtns.) as reported in the Sierra Echo, December 1957, and several peaks in the Las Vegas area. Thanks to Trudie Hunt, I have the following account of the latter trip.

"The Hunts, Bob Boyd, and John Robinson left Christmas day to climb in the Las Vegas area. Thursday we climbed Clark Mountain. Clark is a short steep climb with magnificent views to Baldy, San Jacinto, San Gorgonio, Charleston, Providence, and Telescope. Friday we attempted to find the Auto Club marked road from Searchlight, Nevada, to the New York Mtns., but washouts prevented our getting through. Instead we climbed rocky Hart Mtn. (climbed by DPS in '51) which has hundreds of geodes at its base. Saturday we met another carload (Bud Bingham, Chuck Miller, Don Clarke, and Charlotte Parsons) below Summit Pass to climb Kingston Peak, a dominating mountain range northwest of Clark Mtn. This proved a strenuous seven hour climb, for the peak lies far from the ridge reached by the climb out of the canyon, and is reached via a rocky up-and-down ridge-strictly class 2 unless one wants to climb directly up the cliffs. Sunday we climbed Potosi Peak in Nevada, starting at the wrong edge of the ridge, for we had no contour map--only an Auto Club map. Potosi is a spectacular mountain with great bands of cliffs which make route-finding interesting. The view to snow-covered Mt. Charleston, over a desert area marked by reddish cliffs such as one finds at Zion, was quite a surprise. We descended the mountain in two groups. One was directly down two canyons, which would make an ideal route except for the presence, of icy snow at this time of
 
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